The in-home wiring and installation of video services for a new customer is a labor intensive process. With advent of internet protocol television (IPTV), this process is made more complicated due the various pieces of equipment that have to be configured by the installer in the customer's home. Because much of the intermediate equipment involved is software-based, the configuration of such equipment has become more difficult, adding to the installer time and knowledge required to perform an installation. In addition, many companies are now providing customers with telephone, internet, and video (TV) services all in one package.
In order to provide the different services, and to minimize the types of equipment required, a device known as a residential gateway (RG) is normally installed in the customer's home. Because all of the services are being transmitted to the customer over the internet, the RG serves as the connection point between the various internet-provided services and the individual devices in the customer's home that require the services. The individual devices normally comprise personal computers (for internet browsing), telephones, and one or more television set-top boxes for television viewing.
To complete an installation, the installer must normally configure the residential gateway device before connecting any of the downstream customer equipment. Various standardized protocols and methods are known in the art for automatically configuring residential gateways so that the installer does not have to perform the operation manually. In addition to the gateway, however, the set top boxes which provide video services to televisions in the house also need to be configured. Because IPTV often involves “upstream” data requests from the set top box to initiate reception of a particular program (as opposed to general broadcast TV), the configuration of the set top boxes can be quite complicated and time consuming for the installer.
Unfortunately, prior art methods for automatically provisioning gateways and other customer premises equipment are lacking in a number of respects. For example, U.S. Patent Application Publication No. US 2008/0117902 A1 to Vinneras describes a bridged-ethernet residential gateway unit which uses a dedicated virtual local area network (VLAN) for each device (i.e., phones, TVs, computers) being connected to the gateway. However, the gateway unit of Vinneras operates only at the Ethernet (Layer 2) level and does not perform any Internet Protocol (IP Layer 3) routing functions. Because of this, the gateway cannot perform network address translation (NAT) and cannot “hide” the address details of the set top box, telephone, or personal computer from the outside network, causing an increased security risk. The ability to remotely troubleshoot problems with the individual devices connected to the gateway is also limited.
In addition, the installer must still manually configure the television set top box if any interactive IPTV features are to be enabled. This is typically done by manually inputting the appropriate system equipment identifiers of the set top box, such as internet protocol (IP) addresses, media access control (MAC) addresses, and globally unique identifiers (GUIDs), into the system. The manual input process requires that the installer either key the system identifiers (each of which can be up to thirty-two characters long) into the system before traveling to the customer's home or call the main office of the system provider from the customer's home and verbally convey the set top box identifiers so that another employee can key them in. This not only increases the time required to provision the set-top box, but introduces more opportunities for human error and subsequent rework during the provisioning process.